The orientalising of an Arab Kingdom

I don't talk much about Edward Said over here. Frankly in the period of my interests, which is the Syrian Late Antiquity, I don't have to. I see the Umayyads in the continuum of Eastern Christianity, and not all that East at that. It may however be fair to apply the Orientalist thesis to the Arab Mind itself, as the conquerors encountered their own Orient: Iran.

The 'Abbasid Revolution is cited as a temporal "watershed". At first, though, I doubt it had much effect. If you look into what the Khurasani revolution believed, it's heresy, top to bottom; it had no hope of achieving traxion west of the Euphrates. Caliph al-Saffah and then al-Mansur constituted a coup and then a reaction against the revolution. Their ideology was the same Umayyad / Shi'a Islam - just not run by the Umayyad or 'Alid families. From that perspective, you'll understand certain factors of the new regime's first decades: the renewed focus on the Byzantine frontier, the interference with Madinese fiqh, the flogging of Imam Malik. The 'Abbasids did move court to Iraq - but the fiqh in Iraq by then was hardly Aryan, and Basra was still a major city and effectively a Hijazi Arab colony. Ma'mar bin Rashid in the 140s / 760s represents, in snapshot, direct continuity with the Zubayrids eight decades earlier. Sufyan Thawri, staying in Basra until the 150s / 770s, maintained there the Umayyad tradition.

I think Harun al-Rashid in the late second / early ninth century is when we really start to see Iranian royal theory trickling back into Iraq. Here are Ibn al-Muqaffa's translation of the late Sasanian histor(ies), and the Letter of Tansar. The "Kalila" story from India.

Although I have a bias given I'm looking at the muhaddiths and Muslim jurists like Sufyan and Ma'mar. These trended reactionary and often despised Oriental flourish by name. Which is why I use them, because again I care about the earlier Umayyad era, for which they're among my windows. For the 'Abbasid era and Iranian shu'ubiya, they're tangential... like the Talmud on contemporary Sasanian life and on Christian belief.